WISCONSIN (MacIver Institute) -- Election integrity remains front and center as lawmakers demand answers over repeated Milwaukee central count failures, while Green Bay confronts its own ballot problems and the socialism series continues. Here’s this week’s MacIver Monday newsletter.
Spotlight
Second Wisconsin Republican Asks For Answers About Milwaukee Election Mistakes
Benjamin Yount reports that State Rep. Scott Krug is the latest Republican demanding accountability after Milwaukee’s central count operation once again delayed results during the August primary. A poll worker downloaded audit logs instead of actual vote totals from five tabulators, forcing a late-night recovery and pushing final results past 1 a.m.
Krug said lawmakers will hold a hearing if commission leaders cannot fully explain the error and demonstrate they are ready for November. His comments follow a formal letter from Rep. Dave Maxey seeking a detailed, timestamped account of the failure and a list of prior incidents. Milwaukee Election Commission Chair Paulina Gutierrez again blamed human error while insisting the accuracy of the results was never threatened.
Deep Dive
Michael Lucas continues his series by arguing that socialism, in every form, produces three insoluble economic problems: the incentive problem, the knowledge problem, and the calculation problem. He illustrates them with a familiar example—the classroom group project—where slackers free-ride, the teacher cannot measure individual contributions, and everyone receives the same grade regardless of effort.
Lucas contrasts that failure with the market, where prices, wages, and profit-and-loss signals reward value creation, convey knowledge about scarcity, and allow entrepreneurs to calculate whether resources are being used well. Under socialism, he writes, wage controls, subsidies, taxes, and public ownership distort those signals, misallocate labor and resources, and produce scarcity rather than abundance. The takeaway is blunt: socialism is a group project at scale, and it cannot solve the problems that markets handle every day. Read the full perspectives piece here.
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Coming Soon
Green Bay Promises Changes Following Second Duplicate-Ballot Mailing
Benjamin Yount reports that Green Bay is promising reforms after its clerk’s office mailed duplicate absentee ballots for the second consecutive election, prompting city and state scrutiny.
You Should Know
Late Nights, High Costs, and Lost Confidence: The Case Against Central Count
Wisconsin’s optional central count system has become a recurring source of delay, expense, and eroded public confidence. Only 43 of the state’s roughly 1,850 municipalities use it, yet it concentrates tens of thousands of ballots into high-stakes facilities that repeatedly produce technical failures, overtime costs, and late-night dumps of results.
In this article, we contrast central count with ward-level processing already used by the vast majority of municipalities, arguing that returning absentee ballots to local polling places would cut costs, reduce single points of failure, improve transparency, and restore confidence without expanding early processing.
Quick Click
Dave Maxey Issues Request for Answers Regarding Central Count Errors
Assembly Campaigns and Elections Chair Dave Maxey formally demanded a full accounting from Milwaukee’s election director after the latest central count failure, citing a pattern of repeated mistakes across recent election cycles.
For Your Commute
Michael Lucas joined The Vicki McKenna Show to talk about the creeping rise of socialism and other key Wisconsin stories. Give it a listen.
Last Update: Aug 24, 2026 11:25 am CDT
